Lecture 11: The new “nature” – art and science

If you missed Lecture 11: The new “nature” – art and science from Terence Maloon’s series The 50 years that changed painting 1867–1917, you can watch the recorded version below or on our Youtube channel. 

The lecture series continues on the first Sunday of each month till September 2025. Learn more about the upcoming lectures and book a seat here.

Lecture 11: The new “nature” – art and science
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical shifts in scientific understanding, in philosophy and in visual representation tended to move in unison. It may seem profoundly mysterious how such synchronicity prevailed, yet the parameters of what was possible to think, how it was possible to think, were recalibrated across an entire culture. Analogies to the observations of Brownian motion, parallels to the “field” theories of Clerk Maxwell, intimations of new conceptions of space and time proposed by Poincaré, Einstein and others might have been communicated via simple catch-phrases in the publicity heralding scientific breakthroughs, yet their effect was to inaugurate major changes in approaches to visual representation, constructing a distinctively modern world-view.